


Scratch

by thelma_throwaway



Series: The How-It-Was [3]
Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Bunk Thoughts, Developing Relationship, Eventual Smut, F/M, Suggestive Themes, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:01:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22137478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelma_throwaway/pseuds/thelma_throwaway
Summary: He’s happy looking. Touching comes with complications. She'll have to come to him.
Relationships: Jayne Cobb/River Tam
Series: The How-It-Was [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592782
Comments: 1
Kudos: 52





	Scratch

**Author's Note:**

> Don't own etc., everyone is 18+ and a consenting adult.
> 
> Stand-alone but makes most sense after "A Plain Thought"

She opened like a spring bud one night in a bar fight with bad odds. He’d seen her take a barroom before but this time she wielded herself instead of the other way around. She was following the instructions of her own instinct and it showed, the silly way she stacked her attackers in twos and threes, sending them tumbling into furniture like a cartoon dust-up. 

She was plucking men off their feet like unwanted petals and he started scrubbing ‘little girl’ from his vocabulary. On the way back to the ship he hooted and hollered, shadowboxing her combos against the lampposts and trash bins. Embarrassment, an unfamiliar feeling running hot along the bridge of her nose. He shook her fist in the air like a prizefighter. 

The next time Mal gave him his pick of who to take into a tight spot he didn’t hesitate. 

“Lemme bring the small ‘un.”

The captain refused.

“If I can only bring one with me, should be her. She’s like a-- a octnapus, in a jam.”

Another job and another and another. She’s good company, mostly quiet these days and sometimes she surprises him. She’s got a mind for crime, knows what to pocket from a loaded junk shop. Who to take out first in a fire fight.

She does cross his mind when he’s lying in bed, but so does everyone. Close quarters, long stretches in the black. It was a good way to pass the time, the kaleidoscopic combinations. Zoe, Kaylee, Mal and Innara, River and Mal. Only Simon got left out in the cold. One, two, three at a time in the mess hall, the engine room, his bunk. Sometimes felt as good as it really happening. Tighter crews than theirs had broken up over a lost invitation to the party. 

The night she wrapped her legs around him in the junkyard he’d stroked himself raw, pressing moneybag she’d hidden in her pants to his face. It smelled like gold and her sweat.

She’d known exactly what he meant when he commanded her to act horny. He’s caught her before, with a hayseed at a backwater feast day. He laughed, waved, and left them to it. And another time, at a browncoat bar on a nameless moon. A man three times her size but he’d skittered away when Jayne wandered into the bathroom to take a leak. 

“Thanks,” she’d said flatly, still panting and perched on a filthy sink..

“Sorry, _meimei_.” He’d meant it. He knew how bad it itched when you got interrupted midscratch. She shrugged and hitched up her drawers, asked him not to tell the captain. So there were probably others. 

She likes it when he flirts and teases. And he knows she thinks of him in her bunk, too. He sees her frightening fast brain record how his muscles glide under his skin when he lifts weights, the press of his John Thomas again his pants when they wander by a whorehouse. The way he tenses watching her coax the blade he let her keep, open and shut, open and shut, open and shut.

He’s happy looking. Touching comes with complications. And anyway, how many times were they pressed together during a job? Snugged up behind cover, sliding over each other for a better shot. The worse things went the more reason he had to find his hands on her. 

She can come to him. He won’t wait to be asked twice if she does. But she’ll have to come to him.


End file.
